


came a little closer to the truth that day

by arttemis



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: (doesn't follow that canon i'm just stealing the world), Alice Isn't Dead AU, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Missing Persons, Mystery, don’t have to have listened to it to understand
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-22 12:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19668619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arttemis/pseuds/arttemis
Summary: “I’m not just running from your death, Roy. Wouldn’t want you to get a big head about it. There’s something else. I can’t tell if it’s worse or not.”Jason stops at the red light and sips from his bright pink slushee. Hums, thoughtful and considering. “I mean, objectively, it’s way fucking worse.”-Jason wakes up alone for the first time in years with a man in his living room telling him Roy Harper is dead. He doesn't believe it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title from [Edge of Town - Middle Kids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFWqLLaMOFs)  
> podcast [Alice Isn't Dead](https://open.spotify.com/show/6X9NNwTMXte6udhYDjwHyM) on spotify

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started writing this _agesss_ ago (end of last year/start of this year) and recently found it again. It was untitled but you can pry lyric titles out of my cold, dead, musically inclined hands.
> 
> This follows the same basic plot as Alice, partner goes missing, road trip, thistle men and a few scenes but that's it. When I started this I was about half-way through season 1.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

“Roy,” Jason breathes, radio held up to his mouth and lips so close they are almost pressed to the receiver.

“I’m running now, you know?” He pauses, lifts his thumb from the button on the receiver and changes lanes to avoid a man in a beat-up, puke green Toyota driving twenty miles under the speed limit. 

“Well, I’m _on_ the run,” Jason says. “I’m not sure why yet. It’s just that I woke up one morning and all my things were packed and a man in a suit was sitting on our– _my_ couch with a piece of paper saying you died.” The man in the Toyota flips him off. Jason rolls his eyes and ignores him. “And that– _t_ _hat_ seems like the kinda shit you should run from, right?” He’s speaking quickly now, reliving that moment of pure fucking fear and dread. 

_I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but, there was an accident._

Jason knows it’s _bullshit_ even if at the time he’d seized up and shoved the man out of their apartment so he could hyperventilate in peace.

The radio is silent bar the buzzing of static.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Jason sighs. “He said he was from _Queen Industries_ which is weird, isn’t it? Because you _just_ started working there a couple weeks ago and Roy I–”

–

“I’m out in–” Jason frowns. “I better not say. Never know who’s got their radio on.”

Last week he had to ditch his car and pick up a new one. He still doesn’t know how he missed the blue Honda that had been tailing him for god knows how long. It’s starting to get dangerous running like this. With no contingency plans or back-up. Jason is going on nothing but a hunch and desperation.

“I’m out in the middle of nowhere. The desert. Red sand and nothin’ else.” He’s got his gaze fixed outside his window, hasn’t bothered to check the road since he reached the endless expanse of flat land and straight lines. “It’s nothing like home. Couldn’t move two feet without running into someone.”

Jason drags a hand down his face. Tries to keep his eyes from drooping. It’s the middle of the day and he’s not stopping for a rest.

“We were gonna move. I know you never liked Gotham. Being so close to Star City and the family. _Families_ ,” he corrects himself, memories of Roy rubbing circles on the thin skin of his wrist and telling him about the time his dad tried to put a broken bottle through his neck coming to mind. “I was thinking down south. You wanted to see the gators.” 

There’s a small mountain of takeaway coffee cups, empty cans and magazines on the passenger side floor. He needs to clean up and restock. Jason reaches for one of the National Geographic issues and flips it open to the dog-eared page.

“Been to everywhere in the country but never seen an alligator,” Jason says and clicks the car into cruise control. He props the magazine up on the steering wheel and squints down at the page. “Did you know an alligator can go through two thousand teeth in a lifetime?” 

No answer.

“Yeah, it made me rethink heading south too.” Jason tosses the magazine back onto the floor. “I’d do it though. For you.”

He should buy some better sunglasses. The sun is too bright out here and out for too long. Next time he sees a gas station.

“Tune in later for more gator facts, Roy.”

–

“It’s been two months now,” Jason says and his voice is steady even if his hands tremble. He’s still in the desert but it is night now and the stars in the vast, empty, blackness of the sky are making him homesick for a place he’s never been. The cigarette burning to a stub between his thumb and forefinger doesn't help.

“Well, almost.” Jason blows a mouthful of smoke out the window. It’s too cold to have them down but Jason doesn’t want to be the asshole who leaves the ceiling of a ‘borrowed’ car yellow. Not that the owner will get it back. “One month and twenty-eight days. Or, twenty-seven. You left when I was out of town.”

That had stung when Jason realised Roy wasn’t dead. Still stings.

“Two months and I still haven’t been able to do things. _Normal things_. Things that aren’t chasing after your—your _ghost_ or whatever it is I’m following because I’m not even sure if it’s you anymore, Roy.” Jason takes a breath and a moment to collect himself. He’s getting off track. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just—I can’t listen to music. Of all things.” 

It’s painfully honest. Aside from the crackle of the trucker radio he’s been towing from car to car, Jason’s drives have been silent. 

“ _Music_.” Jason stubs the cigarette out on the half-filled ashtray shoved into the centre console. “It’s not even like we did anything around music. It’s only, you used to listen to it non stop in your workshop and now every time I hear it I feel sick.” He lights up another smoke. If Roy were here he’d say something about how he’s smoking too much lately. Roy isn’t though.

“Not an _I’m going to throw up_ sick either. That’s part of it, sure, but it’s an—an ache. Some part of me that feels like it’s tearing in two.” Jason sighs and drums his fingers against the steering wheel. He hasn’t seen a car in hours. 

“It’s making drives fucking excruciating.”

-

“I’m not just running from your death, Roy. Wouldn’t want you to get a big head about it. There’s something else. I can’t tell if it’s worse or not.”

Jason stops at the red light and sips from his bright pink slushee. Hums, thoughtful and considering. “I mean, objectively, it’s way fucking worse.”

Ugh. He can feel a brain freeze happening. He always forgets why he never drinks these horrible, awful monstrosities until it’s too late. 

“People lose loved ones all the time. You aren’t even lost in that sense. Just missing.” It's not that losing Roy hadn’t hurt. Doesn’t hurt. “But, this. This _thing_ that is, I don’t even know, following me? Stalking me? Hunting me? No, that’s too dramatic.” He keeps the light, easy-going tone to his voice as he says, “I’m scared of it. I think. Something instinctive that feels like it’s ingrained in my DNA because no matter how many times I go over it in my head I can’t shake it. The fear.”

The light turns green and Jason eases his foot down on the 1994 white Ford laser he’s driving. Car’s older than he is but it has next to no security. He’d gotten the door open with the keys from his last car and the screwdriver sticking out from the ignition hasn’t failed him yet. 

“It was, god, it had to have been my first stop. At one of those shitty truck stops with food that always tastes like it’s been sitting in the hot box three hours too long. I’d been driving for,” Jason tallies the hours by tapping his finger against the slushee. “Ten hours. No breaks. On the verge of losing my mind. Almost crashed into the fuckin’ sign.” 

Jason laughs. It’d been terrifying. He’d closed his eyes for a moment and opened them when the bumps on the shoulder of the road rattled the car and he was about to plough right through the concrete divider. He has to adjust the pair of sunglasses to keep them from falling. He picked them up along with his drink when he got into civilisation and out of the desert. 

“So, this truck stop. The lady behind the counter was real nice. Pointed me in the direction of the showers and gave me a plate of pasta salad for free.” 

It had been pretty terrible pasta salad but he isn’t going to let the radio know that. 

“I’m eating my pasta salad in one of those tiny booths with vinyl seats that never have enough leg room. Might have something to do with the fact that I’m what—six foot three?” Dick was always going on about his height growing up. How it wasn’t fair that his little brother was quickly dwarfing him. “I digress. Anyway, too small a booth, lukewarm food and fresh from a cold shower.”

Jason has to stop talking for a moment. He sucks another mouthful of frozen drink into his mouth and swallows it. “Okay, all good.” He shudders and tells himself it’s from the chill of the drink.

“I’m eating and this man is just _staring_ at me from the little bar by the doors to the patio. Did I say they had a patio?” He’s stalling. It’d be obvious to anyone listening. If anyone is listening. “This man is maybe half a head shorter than me and built like a fucking twig but he stares at me like he wants to rip my head from my shoulders and suck the marrow from my bones. And I think, wow, someone never taught this asshole about biting off more than you can chew.

“The lady behind the counter walks over and hands him a plate filled with, I don’t even know, eggs I think? He doesn’t even look down at them, doesn’t take his eyes off me, just picks up one up between his fingers and starts eating.” Jason traces patterns in the condensation building up on the paper slushee cup and lets his mind go.

“Eggs are messy too. You have to be careful not to pierce the yolk in the middle or else they dribble down the sides and you lose like half your breakfast. But this man, he doesn’t give a shit. Just pops them in his mouth one after the other with his hands. 

“His fingers I almost don’t notice. ‘Cause of the way they’re drenched in egg, but, they’re tipped yellow. The kind of yellow you always told me my fingers were gonna go if I didn’t give up smoking but there was something _wrong_ about them. It was like they weren’t really there. If I was any closer I probably coulda seen bone and capillaries and all the little muscles that keep them working. I’m glad I wasn’t.

“But these eggs, half of them are sliding off his plate and the other half are ending up on his chin instead of in his mouth and he _won’t stop looking at me._

“And the lady has gone back behind the counter and I’m still eating my shitty pasta salad even if it’s shitty because I haven’t eaten in a while. Which, yes, you probably have something to say about that, don’t you?” He can hear it, the _Jaybird are you still taking care of yourself?_ Well, no. He isn’t taking care of himself. Not anymore. 

The radio is as ever, faithfully silent. 

Jason will stop leaving lulls in the conversation for it to fill eventually. He’ll learn. 

“Finally, I finish eating and I look at him. Yolk all over his face, these _dead_ eyes that look better suited to paintings than people and this yellow trucker cap squashed on his head. Said ‘thistle’ in white. I look at him and I say, ‘hey, man, do you mind?’

“I guess I shouldn’t have brought attention to the way he was staring ‘cause he got up and he _didn’t walk right._ Walked like he wasn’t used to walkin’. His knees buckled when he slid out of the chair and his ankles looked like they were grinding against bone but he kept going until he was standing next to the seat across from me in the booth. Then, in this voice that really did homage to his tobacco-stained hands, says, ‘hey, man, do you mind?’ and slides into the seat.” Jason pulls onto the highway. Leaves the safety of the suburbs again.

“I say, ‘yeah, man, I do’ or, I mean to. I don’t say anything to him. He smiles at me but it’s as wrong as his walk. Not used to it either, probably. Too many teeth that are just as translucent and yellow as his fingertips. This guy lifts a hand to get the lady’s attention and says, ‘I want you to be very careful about what you say to me,’ and I think, well, fuck you too, buddy.

“Instead, I just nod and wait for him to do something else like he’s the messiah and I’m one of his disciples. He does, do something else, he says, still smiling, ‘Jason, I want you to turn around and I want you to go home.’ He says, ‘Jason, I want you to forget Roy Harper.’

“Honestly, Roy, you may be doing god knows what god knows where but there’s something about hearing your name that will always bring me back to where I need to be. This man says your name and I snap back into myself and I open my mouth and say, ‘get the fuck away from me.’ 

“His smile twists and there are more teeth and they look _sharp_ and I was so sure it was just the light but the lady comes over to our table and—and—“

-

“You ever had one of those quadruple bacon cheeseburgers?” Jason asks. He’s just passed a sign for one and he’s starting to get hungry. “I figure, there’re only so many arteries I _can_ clog and I’ve been on the road long enough that most of them are already there.”

He’s been living off fast food and spending more time in drive-throughs than he’s spending sleeping. 

“Think I’m starting to get fat.” Jason hopes not. Roy won’t care but he does. He’s never quite lost Bruce’s voice in the back of his head talking about efficiency and how ‘one’s body is a temple’. 

“It sounds good though, right?” It sounds terrible but Roy would be salivating over the name alone. 

Jason laughs as he recalls something. “Remember when Dick tried to get you to go on a cleanse with him? You lasted a day and then started getting me to sneak you burgers.”

Dick had been pissed too. The cleanse had left him a little too tired to do more than be disappointed, thankfully.

——

“Those nature docos we used to watch,” he says, fumbling with the words to describe the thing that he had seen. “Remember that ant—or was it a wasp?— that could turn other insects into zombies?”

Silence.

Whatever. Roy remembers. 

“He reaches for this lady and he gets his hand around the back of her neck and he _waits,_ I’m sure of it, until I’ve seen the look on her face. How slack-jawed she is and how vacant her eyes are. Just from him grabbing her.” Jason’s breath comes out in a shuddery exhale. “Like the wasps. He _waits_ and then he slams her face down on the table between us.”

Jason can still hear the _crack_ of her nose against the hard plastic. 

“She doesn’t say anything. Just lets him drag her back up. It was so bad, Roy. So much blood. Like that time when I was a kid, you know? Except, this was just from one hit. The man shows his teeth again and he says, ‘Told you to be careful, Jason.’” Jason mimics the low drawl of the man’s voice.

“I don’t move. I just sit there, staring at the blood dripping into my pasta salad and this poor woman’s face. I should’ve stopped it, I know. Should’ve grabbed that piece of shit by the hair and done the same to him but I _couldn’t_ Roy.

“I got so scared I fucking froze up and this man sees it. He says it again, ‘Forget Roy Harper’. I don’t reply and it’s not good enough. His arm shifts, ripples, prepares to bring the woman’s head down against the table and I know he’s makin' a show of it on purpose. To intimidate me.”

-

“Did we ever say ‘I love you’ to each other?” Jason asks the radio and chews his lip. “I think we did. We must have. We’ve been together for so, so long. Since we were kids.”

He’s driving by another sign, this one for a florist that ships plants out to you. It's got big pink and orange lilies painted on the sign. Same kind of flower Roy got him once.

“We’ve said it. I just can’t remember when right now. It’ll come to me later.”

-

“And, I look up at this man and this woman he’s about to murder or disfigure or _worse_ and I say-”

-

“Third date!” Jason tells the radio, jolting from his lax position. “You wore slacks to the movie theatre, cried during _Marley and Me_ and told me you loved me through the tears.”

Jason had said it back, brushed away Roy’s tears and kissed him. It was messy and gross and both their mouths tasted like salt from the crying.

He can’t believe he almost forgot. Can't help but worry what else he's almost forgetting.

-

“I say, ‘okay’.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kept the feel of the podcast so the style might be a little ehh. It was fun to write at least.
> 
> LMK what you think and if you spot any mistakes! I'll have another chapter up soon (aiming for next week)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's a little shorter but i hope you enjoy!

“It’s hot as hell today, Roy,” Jason says. The setting sun’s burning a hole through his shitty, advertised as UV proof, sunnies and the glare on the bitumen is creating waves in the air. “Looks like everything’s underwater outside. Like I’m driving at the bottom of the ocean. A big one, the Atlantic. One with no fish and waves rolling up from the sand to break at the surface.”

There’s sweat beading at his hairline and dripping down his skin. Jason feels like he’s melting.

“Should’ve grabbed something to drink before heading out. Aircon in this is busted and yes, I’ve tried hitting it.” The black box under the dash on the passenger side had started making an ominous rumbling sound when he turned the air on. Kicking it hadn’t done anything. “Think it’s blowing hot.”

“I miss winter,” he says, wiping sweat from the top of his lip. “I know I’m just gonna start complaining about the cold when it hits but at least blankets don’t need wiring to work.”

"I have a love-hate relationship with all my seasons. Spring has pollen, winter has cold, autumn has trick or treaters and summer has heat. None of them are great but anything is better than this fucking heat. Feels otherworldly."

A blast of warm air hits him. Jason groans and fiddles with the knobs again.

"I can't drive like this."

-

“I’ve never told you this. Was always worried I’d talk about the time before Bruce too much and you’d look at me differently." Jason worries about it with everyone. That one day someone will peel back his layers and see how _'street trash’_ and _'charity case'_ are engraved into his damn bones. "But hey, with the help of liquid courage anything can happen.” Jason taps the bottle of beer against the hood of the car. He’s leaning back on the windscreen, arm over his eyes blocking out the night sky as he thinks back. “Okay, here we go. There's a moral to it, promise." Jason shifts, steeling himself.

“Back when mum was alive Gotham had one of her coldest winters in centuries. It snowed for _weeks_ and at least half the neighbourhood came down with hypothermia. About three-quarters of them died later on from it. There was this girl down the hall. I knew everyone we lost but she was the only one I _cared_ about. She used to crash at our house when her dad got back in town and we used to crash at her's when mine did.

"Sometimes good people are taken for no fucking reason, Roy. She was one of them." Jason had learned about her death a week after the cold snap through her dad breaking down their door and demanding to know where she was.

He gives himself a moment before speaking again. “Mum got sick because when wasn’t mum getting sick? She got sick real bad, spent her days shivering and her nights sweating out of her skin. Nail beds were going black, lips blue, eyes dull. It was the first time I’d seen her so close. Scared the shit out of me.

“I tried to take her to the free clinic and she refused. Said if she went outside her dealer on the corner would get her before the cold got the chance. I was seven. You’ve seen pictures of me as a kid. I barely came up to her waist and as much as I wanted to drag her down to see Leslie, I couldn’t. Had to sit there, tucked up against her side as she froze.

“I went to the clinic after she passed out. The nurse at the front was nice, offered to get me checked with the doctor and some hot chocolate. I let her and broke into the medicine while she was making it.

“I had no idea what the fuck I was looking for. How do you treat hypothermia? Gotta get them warm again. I’d just _left_ my mum in that shithole studio with no heat. I’m reading all these labels and my mind’s going a hundred miles an hour because none of them say shit about hypothermia.

“The nurse comes in, mug in her hands and sees me surrounded by all these bottles of pills. She asks if she can help and I just start crying. I tell her my mum’s dying and that we’ve got no heating and that I don’t _want_ my mum to die.” Jason snorts. "What kid wants their mum to die anyway? I was panicking. Snot running down my face. Crying like if I stopped the nurse would leave."

-

Jason props his feet up on the dash, one foot on either side of the steering wheel. It’s a tight fit. He crams the last bite of a sugared doughnut in his mouth and picks up the receiver from the radio sitting on his lap.

“Hey Roy,” he says. “And whoever’s eavesdropping. I know there’s someone.” He leans the seat back and stretches out. “I just ate and I’m gonna go to bed soon. Starting to see double.”

“Just wanted to say goodnight.” He stares up at the push pins holding the fabric to the ceiling. If he squints and lets his gaze blur, he can pretend it looks pretty. “I think I’m getting used to sleeping alone again. The nightmares aren’t so bad.”

Jason wakes up crying and out of breath most nights, hours before sunrise. Sleeping alone is and always will be hard. 

“Wonder if you can still tell when I’m lying through my teeth? You _used_ to be able to.” Roy could pick up on tells Jason didn’t even know he had. He thought he’d been trained out of all ticks when he lived with Bruce.

“Not important,” Jason says, words getting interrupted by a yawn. He’s parked in a big empty field next to one of the country’s great superhighways. As safe to sleep as any other spot. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Goodnight.”

-

Jason curls inwards, breath coming too fast. He laughs into the mike. “I haven’t had a panic attack since I was a kid but now that you’re missing…” He stops to get enough air to speak. “I have them all the fucking time, you _piece of shit_.” 

They make him feel like he’s suffocating.

-

“This nurse crouches in front of me, grabs my hands and promises my mum isn’t going to die. Says hypothermia is treatable. Common,” Jason tweaks his voice, lowers it to mimic the gentle tones of the nurse subconsciously. 

"She's right. I take her to my mum and they get her back to the clinic. Dealer doesn't show up and she makes a quick recovery." 

"Little girl down the hall is still dead, of course. Couldn't help her like I helped mum because I didn't know she needed help."

Jason wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and gets off the hood of the car, radio tucked against his chest. "Something to think about."

-

“If it wasn’t obvious by the fact that I’m _still_ chasing your ass around the country, I lied. I looked into that man’s flat, flat eyes and told him I’d do whatever he wanted as long as he let that lady go.

“It wasn’t courage. I know you, Roy. I know you’re going to try and twist this to make it look like I was doing anything other than saving my own skin. Doesn’t make it the truth.

“I was shaking, in shock probably. Everything was getting numb. Cold. The winter back in Gotham. I pressed into the corner of the booth and was unable to take my eyes off him. Like a car crash. I just wanted him to let her go.

“This man doesn’t let go of the woman. He nods his head, once, twice, and then yanks the waitress over to his side of the table. ‘You better head back now’ he says. ‘Jason, you better not be lying’ and then he smiles with all his teeth the way dogs bare theirs and says ‘I’ll find out if you’re lying’.” Jason shudders and sinks low in his seat.

He looks out at the field around him through the rolled-up window. It’s flatland that stretches for miles. Nothing is going to be able to sneak up on him out here.

“I’m still waiting for him to catch up,” he admits, eyes locked on the dirt road he can just make out, illuminated by a faulty, yellow-bulbed street lamp. “He’s going to. Might’ve already done it. Sometimes,” Jason's voice goes soft, goes conspiratorial, like he’s telling the radio a secret, “I wake up and I swear I can feel the imprint of a hand wrapped around my throat, smell the staleness of bad breath and rotting teeth.”

-

“Couldn't sleep. I’m heading out.” Jason has been on the road for twenty-five minutes, cruising along it towards the next service station. He's going to try Kansas.

Right now he’s in a dark grey Land Cruiser with no spare tire.

“You think I could be found by the trail of grand theft auto I’m leaving?” Jason asks. “Assuming I don’t know how to cover my tracks, of course.”

Which he does. Jason’s good at what he used to do and you never quite forget how to pop the lock of older models. There’s no trace and no clues left to where these cars are until he dumps them.

“Think the only time I’ve ever been caught was that day with Dickie’s Porshe.” Jason laughs. “God, teenage me was an _asshole_.”

“That was our what? One year anniversary? I promised you I had a surprise prepared and then we snuck into the garage and hotwired the car together.” Apparently, it hadn’t taken long for Dick to notice it gone. Took a few hours for him to find Jason though. “We would’ve been fine if you hadn’t tried to make me drive into that fuckin’ lake.”

Jason had done it. He was seventeen and wasn’t going to miss a chance to fuck with Dick.

“Could’ve kept it for days–” Jason stops talking, eyes going wide. “Fuck!”

-

“What do I do when he finds me?” he asks the radio. “How fast and how far do I run? Do I run at all? Is there any point? Roy, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

-

“Roy,” Jason whispers. “Roy, I don’t know what to do.” He inhales and exhales, putting effort into each breath. Don’t have a panic attack. _Don’t_ have a panic attack.

“Roy,” Jason’s saying his name a lot, he should stop. “He’s just–He’s just _standing_ there.”

In the middle of the road, in the hours before dawn, on a stretch of highway no one should be near without a car or truck or _something_ , is the man from the truck stop. Staring. 

“He can’t see in, yeah? I’ve got high beams on and it’s _dark_ dark out. No stars, no moon.” The man takes a step forward and Jason flinches back in his seat. His voice is small and it is scared when he speaks. “He looks… Roy, I don’t know how to say it.”

There’s blood splatter on the man’s white shirt and dripping from the tip of his nose. Not like he’s had a nose bleed, more, he’s just stood in the arterial spray of some poor son of a bitch. Gore all up his torso and Jason bets if he opened his mouth he’d see it wedged between his teeth. 

The real kicker of it all is the way the man looks as if he is standing under the harsh fluorescent lights of the truck stop. As if neither of them left it. As if he hasn't so much as changed out of the clothes he brutalised the waitress in. The light reflects off his skin, makes it greyscale and yellowed and white all at once. It is, for lack of a better word, haunting.

There's something so unnerving about it. Jason can't quite pick why aside from the _wrongness_ of it all.

Now more than ever does the man look like he belongs in a painting. They went to an art gallery once. In Gotham. All the paintings were artists' renditions of Dante's Inferno. They'd both thought it was stupid and high class and bullshit and something that'd been done a million times. The man looks like he's been ripped right from one of the canvases.

Jason half expects him to speak and let free a torrent of smoke and hellfire.

“I can't just wait for him,” Jason says. He doesn't know how long the man plans on waiting but Jason's got a feeling he knows what's going to happen when he stops. "I'm going to move." Jason flicks the lights off for a second, swallows when the man stays bathed in bright light and turns them back on. “I warned him, kind of.”

The man doesn’t react.

Jason leans forward on the horn, beeping it a few times. The way you do when ducks are crossing the road too slowly. 

Still no reaction.

“Okay,” Jason breathes out, hands trembling a little as he puts the car into gear. “Okay.”

He takes his foot off the break and puts it on the accelerator. The car revs noisily. Nothing. Why is he just standing there?

Like he can here him, the man stops just standing there. He mouths a word. Jason can't make it out too well but the clench in his gut makes it look a lot like _liar_.

Jason tightens his hands around the gear stick and the wheel. He counts to three, jerks the gear stick into fourth and presses his foot down flat. 

He thinks the man won’t move. The car’s moving too fast for Jason to really grasp the idea that he’ll be fast enough. Still, Jason has a split second to register the man darting off the road and then he hears a _bang_ against the left backdoor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> doesn't feel like there's much actual road tripping in this one but jay's getting his sylvia next chapter
> 
> LMK what you thought!! and if you see any mistakes!!

**Author's Note:**

> Updates on Sundays!!
> 
> I'm [on tumblr](https://lanternrayner.tumblr.com/)!


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